Homegrown firms rush to fill network camera gap as Chinese players blocked

Homegrown surveillance camera companies and chip design startups are rushing in to fill the vacuum in the $2-2.5 billion network camera market, where mandatory certification requirements imposed by the government from April 1 have effectively blocked Chinese giants from selling in the country.

Chinese companies, including global majors Hikvision and Dahua, controlled a dominant one-third of the Indian market, which has been growing at over 16 per cent per annum. Not only that, a majority of the core components were imported from China.

Filling the vacuum and giving a big push to Make in India — as much as 2.5 million units are sold annually — are homegrown network camera manufacturers. These include Aditya Infotech, makers of CP Plus, Prama India, VVDN Technologies, Matrix Comsec, Vicon Security, Samridhi Automation, Qubo, owned by Hero Electronix, part of the Hero group, and Securus, which together have received certification from the government for manufacturing and selling over 196 network camera models till August this year, according to the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY).

The move to stop foreign companies from importing system-on-chips (SoCs) and critical hardware from restricted countries — mainly China — has also encouraged many startup chip design companies under the design-linked incentive (DLI) scheme to work on silicon for powering these CCTVs. SoCs account for 25-35 per cent of the bill of material cost of the cameras.

Among the companies cleared for funding under the DLI scheme, Chennai-based Mindgrove Technologies has created vision chips that are being commercially rolled out and has already signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Prama, which has the largest number of cameras cleared, to deploy its SoC on surveillance products.

Kerala-based Netrasemi has already tested an advanced 12 nm vision SoC optimised for high-end video analytics and has built its own intellectual property (IP). The company is backed by Zoho Corporation.

Other fabless chip companies are also entering the fray. Ahmedabad-based IndisemiC wants to grab at least 5 per cent of the network CCTV camera chip market and hopes to tape out the chips by the end of December. Then there is OptoML, which is focused on power efficiency for the cameras.

The move has also led camera manufacturers to shift their sourcing of SoCs from China to Taiwan, South Korea, the US and Singapore for the time being.

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology made it mandatory from April 1 for companies selling network cameras to get certification from the Standardisation Testing and Quality Certification Directorate under the ministry, model by model, without which they cannot manufacture or sell in the country.

Every model has to clear both firmware and hardware cybersecurity evaluation. The microscopic tracing of hardware and software in the cameras will help homegrown companies export to western countries, which are also putting restrictions on Chinese CCTV products.

The decision was made primarily because of concerns over cybersecurity risks and data sovereignty.